Over There (2024) by Matthew Osterholzer

Attending the 2024 Norfolk New Music Workshop, I was asked to set a text written by the American composer Charles Ives in honor of his 150th birthday. After quite a bit of research and reflection, I wrote this work, using the text of Ives' Tom Sails Away, with the following program:
"Charles Ives is often characterized as a man ahead of his time, strikingly modernist, and always looking towards the future. Yet looking back at the core of Ives’ work, I find that Ives too is looking to the past, watching as his childhood recedes under the tides of industrialization, social change, and global conflict. Some elements of Ives’ expression of memory and nostalgia still feel timeless, but others have become almost alien.
In his song Tom Sails Away, Ives captures the weight of the First World War through contrast with childhood memories of innocence and togetherness. Reflecting on my childhood nearly a century later, the divide seems artificial. I was born in 2002, and America’s overseas military engagement has been a near-constant. When setting Ives’ text, I remembered listening to NPR as a young child and wondering about the impact of each story on my uncle, serving in the military. I remembered entering high school during an election season and becoming aware of an idealized American past not so different from Ives’s, only placed half a century later. I remembered my history classes of the following years, which told the story of how America’s early industrial era led directly to a post-war society that led in turn to the modern realities of global violence, nationalism, and environmental destruction. And I wondered what childhood memories are being made today, for those in my country and for those around the world whose lives are shaped by my country’s actions.
​
Ives’ original work already accepts that we cannot return the past, and that we cannot undo what has been done. All that I hope to do with my rendition is provide a space to consider how the present was born from that same past, and what we can do now to make a more beautiful future."
​Performed by the 2024 Norfolk New Music Fellows.
Text:
Scenes from my childhood are with me,
I’m in the lot behind our house upon the hill,
A spring day’s sun is setting,
mother with Tom in her arms
is coming towards the garden;
the lettuce rows are showing green.
Thinner grows the smoke o’er the town,
stronger comes the breeze from the ridge, ‘
Tis after six, the whistles have blown,
the milk train’s gone down the valley
Daddy is coming up the hill from the mill,
We run down the lane to meet him
But today! In freedom’s cause Tom sailed away
for over there, over there!
Over there! The lettuce rows are showing green.*
Over there! A spring day’s sun is setting.*
Scenes from my childhood
are floating before my eyes.
*Deviates from Charles Ives' original text.

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